by Mark Helprin
“Did you tell him that?”
“No.”
“You should have.”
“I couldn’t. He was the lecturer. I was the audience. But,” she asked, sweetly, “Harry, when we finally, completely, totally . . . fuck . . . will all this quite wonderful preface have gone to waste?”
“What do you think?”
“I think maybe not,” she said, her eyes slightly glazed, and then they fell back into one another and lost track of time.
They were astounded whenever they came into one another’s presence, and amazed when they touched. When they did—a kiss slightly slower than custom would countenance, or with fingers entwined as they went down the stairs of the subway, or when he brushed her hair from her eyes, or touched her lightly through her suit or her dress, even once when he touched the aquamarine brooch pinned to her linen jacket—the touch was as exciting as if they were falling through the air, a sensation Harry knew well.
Now, on the shadowed slope of a dune that was the last wall of land to face the sea, on silken cold sand, they sat together, thinking that the way they felt would last forever. Far out on the water, a distant sail glided silently, true to the speed of the wind and heading into the horizon. Tranquil, remote, and, above all, silent, it moved toward a great open space. “If that’s death,” Harry said, “then I look forward to it. I confess that when I see a sail shining in white, moving in the distance toward the shadows as if to go from this world to the next, I want to follow.”
“Harry,” she said, intent upon bringing him back, “it’s a sailboat. It’s not death. Don’t follow. Just stay with me as long as you can.”
“You don’t always have a choice in the matter,” he said, remembering.
“I know. But . . . just drop it. We have a sailboat, you know.”
“I didn’t.”
“We do, and you can go on it far beyond the horizon and you don’t die, you come back. It’s at our house in Maine. It’s fifty-four feet—what the man who built it called ‘a bonny yacht,’ and more than seaworthy. You can sail all over the world in it.”
“I didn’t know you had a house in Maine.”
“We have a cabin, sort of, on Mount Desert Island. We keep the boat there in summer. In October after hurricane season it goes to Florida.”
“You have a house in Florida?”
She nodded.
“Where don’t you have a house?”
“That’s not fair. We have houses,” she counted on her fingers, “only in New York, Florida, Maine, and London. Like an isosceles triangle.”
“A triangle with four angles.”
“Like an isosceles triangle.”
“What’s the name of the boat?”
“The Crispin.”
“It is a lot of money,” he said, “isn’t it.”
“It’s a very lot of money.”
“I don’t want any of it.”
“I’m the only child.”
“I know.”
“If you marry me, you’re going to have to learn to live with it. That’s a job in itself—although most people don’t know it—because it can easily ruin you. Are you going to let it ride?”
“Let what ride?”
“That my parents don’t know you’re Jewish.”
“No, but I’m overwhelmed now. . . . It’s more of a problem that my business is almost insolvent.”
“It is?”
“It is.”
A minute passed, until Catherine said, “My father could take care of that with the stroke of a pen. Eventually, I’ll be able to take care of it with the stroke of a pen. Actually, I think I can now. I’m not really sure. But you won’t allow that.”
“If I did, you’d be marrying nothing.”
“When that horrid Rufus said what he said, and I foolishly went along with the tenor of it, why didn’t you protest? Why didn’t you defend yourself? Are you ashamed?”
“Not ashamed, fatigued.”
“At not even thirty-two?”
“At not even thirty-two. And I won’t let people like him dictate my focus, take me from the ability to live my life as I please. Some people think it’s their responsibility to fight every fight, and it becomes their lives. I want to live otherwise. At the moment I don’t feel that I have to take up every challenge. Anyway, it would be impossible. And then there was the matter of mercy. Rufus has an appointment to keep in the very near term. I have no desire to disturb the little peace he may have left.”
“So you let it go.”
“I let it go.”
“And with my parents?”
“Will they object? You tell me.”
“I don’t know what they’ll do.”
“What would you like me to do, Catherine, announce it over the lobster course? ‘Oh, by the way, I’m a Jew, how do you do?’”
“You might think of a more graceful and considerate way.”
“I don’t feel apologetic.”
“I didn’t mean that. I mean that they come from a different era, and they don’t love you. They’re my parents, and I love them. What if you had told your father and your mother that you were going to marry a Christian?”
“My father would have been at sea: the line of five thousand years coming to an end—I don’t know what he would have done. But it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“We have a line, too.”
“I know that. But before I do this difficult thing I would like at least not to be bankrupt. I may never be rich, especially as it has never been my ambition, but it’s one thing for a Jew to ask the hand of Catherine Thomas Hale, and another for a bankrupt Jew.”
“How long until that might be settled?”
“At this point it seems like eternity, but if there’s no way out it won’t last for much more than a year, possibly a lot less.”
“That’s too long. I want to marry you sooner: today would be fine with me. And anyway, in a year they’d find out somehow and think we were keeping it from them. You’re going to have to find a way to fight two fights at the same time.”
22. Young Townsend Coombs
BILLY AND EVELYN usually came out early on Fridays, but an engagement in New York had delayed their arrival until Saturday evening, when a cold supper would await them in a quiet house. That afternoon the remnant of a southern gale had raised the waves to ten feet or more, and in bright sun they struck the shore like hammers. Since childhood Catherine had called these the hurtful waves, for they hit as if with a lifelong grudge. They turned the ocean into an enemy, and made swimming in it a combat in which life could be taken. Though Europeans did not swim in waves like this, Americans did.
She had gone into the breakers with Harry, holding out her hands to him when she sighted what looked like a particularly vicious wave coming at great speed, which is what she had done in milder conditions when her father had first taught her how to maneuver in the surf. She was not embarrassed in violent waters to hold out her hands for protection, because she was no more reluctant to rely upon him than she was to give herself to him entirely.
After half an hour of tense fighting, she sat on the beach, a towel draped around her, and there she regained her balance and sense of gravity as she watched him duel with the swells. At a disadvantage when he was looking out for her and lost in calculations of when a front of water would strike, or whether to advise diving into it or riding over it, now he merely fought. Huge masses would loom over him, and he would either dive into their momentarily gelatinous walls or stand his ground and disappear for a full minute in a hell of foam as he was tumbled head over heels and banged against the hard sand floor.
Sometimes he was smacked from behind by a wave curving unexpectedly and snapping like a whip. Sometimes he punched back, as if the ocean could feel. And sometimes he swam hard to catch a wave at its crest before it broke, launching himself into the empty air behind it and dropping six feet or more, as if he had leapt from a rock. She knew from watching him in the water that he was not only the kind of
man she wanted but the very one; that though, because she loved him, she would marry him even were he weak and unable to endure, he had great resources. He had what her heart cried out for, and strength that was bred in the bone.
When they came in from the beach she went to wash her hair and to dress. He dived into the pool to rinse off the salt, combed his hair, and put on shirt and shoes. Sitting in his customary khaki shorts as they dried, on a teak bench in the garden by the pool, he heard the patter of her shower. After an hour—first of cascading foam; then dressing in clean, pressed clothes; the application of light makeup; and choosing of jewelry (she was now free to wear her beautifully worked diamonds, sapphires, and gold)—she would have come as far from the sea as possible while it was yet close. Eventually she would appear in the garden, so graceful, civilized, and powerful that he imagined that the Atlantic, still striking beyond the wall of dunes, might be held at bay.
He stared out over the fields, his balance not completely restored and the roar of the ocean that he heard within almost as loud as its actual static carried by luffing winds into the garden. As if he had not left the waves, if he closed his eyes he didn’t know where he was. For a moment, a cloud of humid, perfumed air from the second floor of the house traveled past him. He heard the water slapping the base of the shower after she had gathered it in her hair and it had overflowed and fallen. Then that receded as the wind moved along the compass rose. As he sat in the garden set like an emerald in fields of row crops planted daringly close to the ocean, he was slowly coming back to land.
In a distant field between a line of oaks and the first rising of the dunes he saw a deer grazing in shadow. He knew that with a rifle he would be able to bring it down with a single shot at three hundred yards. He could calibrate range and elevation and compensate for the easterly wind. He had almost a sixth sense that would tell him when the animal would take a step or if it would stay still. But even had he had a rifle he would not have taken this beckoning shot, for what he knew of shooting he had learned as a prelude to and in the practice of killing men, and he wanted never to hold a rifle again.
The night before, fireflies had woven through the trees in great profusion, blinking in the darkness, crossing overhead as if to find refuge in the camouflage of the stars, and at a distance passing for the traces of meteors. Now, in full sun and heat, the fields seemed solid and immutable, gravity was aligning itself properly in his inner ear, the surf fading, and dreams burnt away by the afternoon sun. This was a tranquil place where beauty, tradition, and wealth were like the walls of Holland that kept back the sea. Surrounded by the great stillness of the fields, he was about to fall asleep.
But then, from the east, with the suddenness of a pistol shot, a brightly colored monoplane came roaring at him, six feet above the ground, as straight as if it were on a track aligned with the cultivated rows. Just beyond the garden, not fifty feet away, the mass of this plane, with blood-red trim but otherwise as yellow as the yolk of an egg, streaked over the hedge in a blur, the engine noise vibrating in Harry’s chest and rattling every pane of glass in the Hale house. Catherine pushed her bathroom window fully open and peered out at nothing.
Then it came back from the other direction, still flying astonishingly low. After attacking the fields with spray, the plane closed its nozzles, flew for an instant in the clear, and, just before it would have ploughed into a dune, pulled up, rolled, and doubled back, dropping low and releasing spray as it thundered by. Catherine returned her window to its former position ajar, and Harry stood up, following the plane to the end of the field and longing for its return.
As mist rose from the ponds and began to cover the lawns of Further Lane, and the ocean thudded nearby like a metronome, it was for Harry the eleventh of July, 1943, at the height of summer and after the triumph in North Africa. The sun rose over the Mediterranean east of Tunisia, changing the color of the sea, first from a furious gray inappropriate to summer heat, to a kind of melon green, and then to cold blue. Far away and in silence, fleets of fighters rose and fell like swallows, dipping over the swells, rising in great arcs, and suddenly turning. Inland at Kirwan, the traffic was immense and unceasing. Dappling the sky like dense flak, British and American planes of every type moved intently upon their separate missions, going to or returning from the invasion of Sicily.
As the sun climbed, the sea became a canvas wet with color, dotted with ships still disappearing over the horizon to mate the rear echelons of the armies to their advance guard fighting in a battle that threw its electricity back upon the troops waiting to take part. To a paratrooper at his assembly point, it was miraculous. Never did the planes not fill the sky; never did they cease forming up, only to move north and away; never did they collide as they swarmed; and never did they not inspire as they lifted from the runways, their engines at full power, each plane rising until it was a silent black speck, then silvery white, then an afterimage, and then nothing. When they returned it was as if they were born out of the same nothingness, though unlike that which is reborn, when they finally touched down they seemed heavy and tired.
That day, the paratroopers rested and checked their equipment over and over. The 504th and 505th Regiments of the 82nd Airborne were already fighting the Hermann Göring Division north of Gela on the coast of Sicily. Though the battle was fought far from sight, it was possible to feel the tension rising and falling, and though the remnants of the 82nd, held in reserve at Tunis, were supposed to be at rest, their exhaustion began as the first of the other regiments departed for Sicily. They could not help it.
As the day wore on, a messenger delivered orders. Between 2230 and 2400, they would be dropped onto the beach at Gela to reinforce troops already landed and fighting. Harry and the seven pathfinders with whom he shared a tent would fly on and jump at Ponte Olivo, perhaps, depending upon the course of the next hours’ fighting, beyond a line that the 504th and 505th had not been able to breach. The object was to get behind advance elements of the Hermann Göring Division that had descended to defend the coast, mark drop zones for subsequent landings, scout the terrain, cut telephone wires, change road signs, and blow bridges.
The waiting was difficult in itself and made more difficult in trying to decide, for example, what to eat, a problem no one had ever solved completely. Rough air, natural anxiety, and day-long intermittent nausea dictated that they should not eat much, and the temptation was not to eat at all. No one wanted to drop or land, much less move and fight, on a full stomach. On the other hand, their strength was already draining from them, and in just hours on the ground it would be much more rapidly depleted. A proper balance was hard to achieve, true rest improbable.
As the commander of his small detachment, the oldest, and an officer, Harry had to take charge, an improvisation that he himself had to believe so as to give others confidence. Everyone had tried to sleep, but even had it not been too hot in the tent they wouldn’t have been able to, and they worried that when having to draw upon all their resources to stay alive they might instead surrender to fatigue and death. This, in turn, made sleep, which had been merely unlikely, only something to dream about.
He told them that they should neither try to sleep nor be anxious for lack of sleep. “Your anxiety will disappear in the roar of the engines,” he said. “From the moment of takeoff you’ll want to make the jump more than anything in the world, and when you exit the plane you won’t be afraid. You’ll work your skills, move as you’ve never moved before, and wonder, How did I get from there to here if I can’t remember it? And you won’t be weak or tired for at least a day or two.”
As always and often, they checked and rechecked their equipment: their many times cleaned and well oiled carbines, their pouches of ammunition, the radio, grenades, explosives, and harnesses. They counted their rations and calculated days. They opened pouches to make sure that the bandages and morphine they had seen there twenty times that day were still in place. And every time they looked up they saw the planes beginning or ending
their missions, circling slowly in the far distance almost over the sea, rising quickly, descending sharply, and, nearer the field, turning in vertiginous arcs.
In a vast, prayerful order of silence, thousands of men went about their separate tasks. Even before battle they had entered into a deep connection with those, past and future, who had found or would find themselves part of a great host, moving as if without will, coordinated and sanctified by death. This pointless and tragical fugue had rolled through history since the beginning. The pace may have varied, but the harvest was steady over time, its momentum increasing and undiminished. It moved evenly, treated all passions equally, and was as cold and splendid as the waves in winter.
What force, he wondered, could paint such a canvas and command such dedication while never failing, again and again, to take sons from mothers, husbands from wives, and fathers from children? Unable to hesitate or protest, he looked toward the weapons and equipment he had made ready many times over, and felt love that would forever abide for all those he had followed, and all who would follow after, in thrall of this tide.
Townsend Coombs was too young for his name, which properly belonged to a portly, middle-aged insurance salesman in a small town, though not the one in New Hampshire from which Townsend Coombs had come, but perhaps in Indiana or Ohio, or some other place that sophisticates, having visited for perhaps an hour, would then mock for eternity.
His town had a name like that of one of Fenimore Cooper’s Indians, and neither Harry nor anyone else could ever get it straight. In writing reports that called for this reference Harry had to look it up each time and carry the spelling verbally from where he saw it written to where he himself would write it—Ashtikntatippisinkinkta (truly)—as if it were water that would run through his cupped hands. He never managed to spell it the same way twice, and neither did anyone else, and the only one who could actually say it was Townsend Coombs himself. This and other things suggested very strongly that Townsend Coombs should have been in that town rather than in North Africa somewhere south of Tunis. He was more than ten years younger than Harry, who, not yet thirty, seemed to him to be heavy, slow with age, someone who knew what was over the wall. Townsend Coombs hardly had a beard, and his face was almost as round as a child’s. He did—often unconvincingly—what the older men did, and adopted their expressions, their language, and to some extent the way they moved, although his age allowed him to move with a smoothness he could not banish even when he tried to imitate what he thought was the weariness of experience. As the youngest, he had no choice but to follow. This was to be his education, and he took to it not from a tendency to imitate but as a means of staying alive. They were much older, they were still living, and theirs was the only story available to heed. And as he discovered in training and their time in North Africa, the other seven were watching out for him.
